Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Getting to work on diversity at Google

googleblog.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 252 posts

Re: Getting to work on diversity at Google

#101

Post by enneff »

EGreg wrote: post #21
EduardoBautista wrote: post #7

I don't understand why companies are obsessed with diversity just for the sake of it. Edit: I am mexican, and I personally wouldn't like to be hired for diversity reasons, I would prefer to be hired on my abilities.

I agree. I am a Russian Jew and I never needed or wanted to be hired based on diversity needs.

And Google wouldn't hire you just because you're a minority.

The article specifically discusses Google's attempts to lure people of diverse backgrounds into computer science earlier, so that there is more diversity among the qualified candidates applying at Google.

Nobody at Google got hired to fill a diversity quota.

Re: Getting to work on diversity at Google

#102

Post by enneff »

[deleted] wrote: post #71
dragonwriter wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 72.4% of Americans are White, yet 61% of Google employees are White. Technically Whites are under-represented. > Women earn 18% of computer science degrees, yet 30% of Google employees are Women. Technically women are over-represented. How come you use "Americans" as the universe of comparison in the first sentence and "CS degrees" in the second? I suspect that neither is the universe of comparison that Google is l…

[deleted]

> Between the lines they are indeed hinting towards "soft quotas".

No, they're not. They're talking about increasing the number of qualified candidates in the recruiting pipeline. I've said it before in this thread and I'll repeat it here: Google wants to hire _as many qualified candidates as possible_. We've got a huge pile of money but not enough people!

Re: Getting to work on diversity at Google

#103

Post by waveman2 »

heterogenic wrote: post #85
Torgo wrote: post #14

So women make up 18% of new CS degrees and Google's staffed at 17%. Blacks and hispanics make up under 5% of CS degrees and at Google they make up 3%. Close the ticket, it's an upstream problem.

Not necessarily. You're assuming that the factors which drive women out of engineering do so independent of ability. I would hypothesize that this is false, that the most interested and passionate women are least likely to be nudged out. Google should be comparing its ratio to that of their potential pool, which is presumably skewed high. If that's true, they should be expecting to get closer to 50%. (Not exactly 50,…

> I would hypothesize that this is false

Citation required.

And if women are less interested overall in CS and/or have less ability on non-verbal tasks overall then you would expect that the RHS tail of the distribution of women would be lower than the RHS tail of the distribution of men. This is just basic statistics.

The same applies with African Americans. Blacks in the US have far lower IQs than whites - this is not in dispute though there is a certain amount of dispute about the reason, with some people attributing it to environment. As such the normal distribution will ensure that a much lower percentage of blacks will be at the high end of the scale (135IQ+) where google gets their recruits.

So the fact that google is close to the averages suggests they are already making a lot of effort to bring in women (and non-asian) minorities. Asians are highly over-represented at google versus their fraction of the population.

Re: Getting to work on diversity at Google

#104

Post by waveman2 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #59
Torgo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My response was flippant, which is probably why some people have been downvoting it, but I'm legitimately glad if they're working to make their hiring pool more representative of the population. But at the same time, it's hardly their fault or responsibility to "fix" it if universities just aren't graduating people in those proportions. This came right after I'd read a PBS article that claimed "Google finally disclos…

> My response was flippant, which is probably why some people have been downvoting it, but I'm legitimately glad if they're working to make their hiring pool more representative of the population. But at the same time, it's hardly their fault or responsibility to "fix" it if universities just aren't graduating people in those proportions. If they have reasons to prefer a diverse workforce, whether or not they are at…

> it is their responsibility to fix it.

This seems to contain two embedded and unexamined assumptions.

1. That this is a problem. If women prefer not to go into sciency fields (other than biology) why is that inherently a problem? Do you think women are too dumb to make their own choices?

2. That it can reasonably be "fixed". Spending more money on education must be the most commonly employed and most universally failed intervention in social policy.

I would also question the premise of the posting, that "diversity" in terms of race and sex is a highly desirable thing. The evidence for this is very thin, and indeed more ethnically diverse communities tend to have lower levels of trust and social capital.

There is some evidence that diversity in terms of viewpoint and skills is useful but just eg having more white women in the office may not be the great boon people assume.

Re: Getting to work on diversity at Google

#105

Post by SilasX »

brighteyes wrote: post #81
DiggityDug7 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does there have to be a business goal? Making society more fair is a good goal. Reducing the white male preference in the job market should be a social responsibility for a company that greatly impacts our daily lives. There could be business goals though: it improves people's public opinion of you and in this case may help protect them from lawsuits. This link at the bottom of the page has some more info... http://w…

> Making society more fair is a good goal. Reducing the white male preference in the job market should be a social responsibility for a company that greatly impacts our daily lives. The data Google just posted contradicts you. 61% of Google employees are white, while 80% of the total US workforce is, see e.g. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/28/google-releases-emp... That means white people are under -represente…

OT: I had this in mind when the character on House of Cards complained that she'd feel like a token Asian minority if she worked at Google.

Writer research failure.

Re: Getting to work on diversity at Google

#106

Post by kirkbackus »

asdfologist wrote: post #87

I'd be really curious to see the gender/ethnic breakdown of just the Google software engineers. As it stands it's hard to make a meaningful comparison between Google and the overall US population of CS majors.

They don't have the software engineers specifically, but they have the breakdown of the "Tech" people http://www.google.com/diversity/at-google.html#tab=tech

Re: Getting to work on diversity at Google

#107

Post by waveman2 »

cbhl wrote: post #89
nl wrote: post #64

Are these diversity numbers for the US or for Google as a whole? If they are world-wide, I find it quite interesting how closely the location of the Google offices where software development occurs[1] matches the ethnicity numbers. Notably, there is only one development office in Latin America (and none in Spain/Portugal), and the only development office in the Middle East or Africa is Tel Aviv (not clear what ethnic…

Race is US, Gender is Worldwide.

In a number of countries you are not allowed to ask someone's race, let alone record it on your computers.

In the USA it is compulsory so you can provide these stats and protect yourself against lawsuits.

Re: Getting to work on diversity at Google

#108

Post by thaumasiotes »

Torgo wrote: post #48
rcthompson wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they say they're working with "upstream" to resolve the issue: "Among other things, since 2010 we’ve given more than $40 million to organizations working to bring computer science education to women and girls. And we’ve been working with historically black colleges and universities to elevate coursework and attendance in computer science. For example, this year Google engineer Charles Pratt was in-residence at…

My response was flippant, which is probably why some people have been downvoting it, but I'm legitimately glad if they're working to make their hiring pool more representative of the population. But at the same time, it's hardly their fault or responsibility to "fix" it if universities just aren't graduating people in those proportions. This came right after I'd read a PBS article that claimed "Google finally disclos…

> I'm legitimately glad if they're working to make their hiring pool more representative of the population

What is the benefit of this?

Re: Getting to work on diversity at Google

#110

Post by thaumasiotes »

nl wrote: post #57
[deleted] wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Does this mean we should empose[sic] quotas to get Blacks out of the NFL and replace them with Whites No to the quotas. But yes, race in the NFL (and in many sports) is an issue that should be addressed. The old problem of the low proportion of black quarterbacks is slowly being addressed, and the Rooney Rule[1] has had some success with the underrepresentation of black coaches. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roone…

This is a truly comical response. To you, the only obvious racial characteristics of the NFL are

(1) Not enough black quarterbacks

(2) Not enough black coaches

and those are issues that need to be addressed?

How is the low proportion of black quarterbacks a bigger problem than the ultra-low proportion of white non-quarterbacks?

Post reply on HN